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Does ODF Have a Future?
qedramania writes "Linuxworld seems to think ODF is a dead duck. Is the Windows monopoly too big and too entrenched? Other than diehard Linux fans, does anyone really care if they have to keep paying Microsoft to do basic word processing? It seems as though the momentum is towards a complete Microsoft monoculture in software for business and government. You can bet that big business and governments will want more than just reliability from Microsoft in return for their acquiescence. Does ODF have a future?"
Open Office will happily read/write/create MS Word files. That said, it seems that ODF is gaining popularity, not losing it.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I don't think it's a technical issue at all, it's just what people "know". Whenever I go on a job hunt people ask for my resume "in a Word .doc", as if that's the only possible format.
Option 1: Continue to use MS formats, and continue to pay. Save money now in the short term.
:). Yes, it will be expensive to convert from .doc to ODF, but won't it be worth it in the long run?
:)
Option 2: Break free from MS formats, and help develop a better, free format. Outlay some money to break free, never pay again (unless you're feeling charitable.
Red Hat created a logo and posters recently to help spread ODF. Print a couple of copies and stick them up somewhere. Maybe include a link to openoffice.org.
ODF is far from dead.
It's a great alternative that only computer literate people will every try, and that most businesses will ignore because it doesn't matter for them.
And then the alternative will gain marketshare to the point that even mainstream consumers are trying it out, which will cause businesses to notice.
Honestly, the analogy I'd think of is Imperial vs. Metric. The rest of the world isn't nearly as wedded to Microsoft as the US is. Therefore, we're likely to see uptake of ODF become significant elsewhere before it becomes significant in the USA.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
I'm pretty sure ODF isn't dying. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that Office 2007 natively (or with a plugin available from MS's website) supports ODF as a native format to save and open from, just like you can specify that Word uses .doc instead of .docx.
IMHO, ODF is far from being dead.
The entity that installed the ring, expects to recover the cost of the ring, plus a lot more.
Freedom is not free, but slavery costs more.
It seems to me that open formats are most important for government archival purposes. That is, state governments are producing huge amounts of public documents that really ought to be preserved for posterity. Saving them in an open format (free from copyright protection which lasts 120 years in the instance of an institutional author like MS) seems to be a pretty good step to take towards that goal.
My question is, what are the practices of digital archival in state governments? Do they even have one? I'm taking it for granted that things like bills and committee reports are turned into pdfs and made publicly available, but what about letters to constituents, emails between legislators and things like that?
About as many stories I hear of ODF being rebuffed in the US, I seem to hear of it being adopted overseas. Not 100% penetration, but still better than in the US.
In that light, perhaps the metric system is the correct analogy.
Maybe the limit has more to do with how many politicians Microsoft can buy. For many years they ignored politics, preferring to exert their force against "business partners." After the antitrust suits they began to learn about US politics, and with ODF they began to meddle in state politics. But there are subtle difference in politics in every political entity - do it wrong and you're even worse off. They've just put a lot of effort into China, obviously because it's a big emerging market. They'll likely put a lot of effort into India, too. But beyond that, it starts getting little - and local.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Considering that MS Office is a tried and tested solution with a huge support network, a product can't really compete on being a little bit worse (i.e., a raft of unknown headaches) for a few bucks less. I bet you'll find more people who'll pay 10% more for a 10% better product than 10% less for a 10% worse product. If your perception of 'worse' or 'better' in a given situation skews those numbers, the choice becomes easier or harder, but it still kind of boils down to your cost/quality curve. And I'd suspect Linux power users are more concerned with quality than cost.
Seriously, have you ever wondered how PDF managed to get so usual? People began using them in web pages, and asking for you to get adobe acrobat reader to read it, that's how it works. If people want your information they'll use your format.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
.DOC and PDF are the standards and will stay that way for a long time. There first must be a shift in applications. For example if Google Docs and OO.org can penetrate the market then you might see a slow shift. If you breakdown the OS by percentages and then the applications within those Operating Systems, you just have a long way to go. OO.org just committed to porting to the Mac. Sure NeoOffice is an alternative, but it has some major weaknesses. But Even if everyone on Mac and LInux switched to OO.org and Google Docs, you will still have a majority of people on windows using Word.
You also have to get the word out. How many non technical people know what ODF is? Not many. How are you going to promote it? The only way you can do this is for big companies to jump on board and make all internal documents ODF and eventually that'll push to outside firms. However, it's not likely in the near term. It does have a chance to creep in when more companies use web service for office suites, but that's a ways off.
The Microsoft RTF 'standard' is re-written with every version of MS-Word. It has exactly the same compatability problems as MS-DOC because it's about the same format, just asciified. Also an MS-WORD RTF file usually contains three seperate versions of the document (a) the document in the current RTF variant, (b) the document in the previous RTF variant and (c) an original style approximation of the document. This is one of the reasons it makes such big files. (The other major one is that MS-Word usually puts images in the file as hexdumped BMP files!)
RTF is seen as more compatible than MS-DOC because the previous version of word can read the file; but that's a con, it's just a single step reversed combatability not true interoperability.
Finally it's also got the same problem as OOXML, a very, VERY badly written standards document.
I work as a hotliner for a computer retailer (no, not Dell).
The latest trend on our computers is to bundle them with a trial edition of Microsoft Office (60 days). This doesn't support saving your files it seems, nor priting or anything else even remotely useful apart from viewing documents.
Once we explain customers that they have to pay Microsoft to get a fully functioning version of the program, they almost always ask where to get something else, that works without having to pay for it. I always tell them to try out OpenOffice.org - see if it fits their needs. If it does, great - they've just saved a minor fortune. If not, they can always switch back to paying for MS Office.
Same when the computer is bundled with MS Works, which for some really arcane reason doesn't want to play nice with MS Office.
While I've no feedback from all of the customers that I've advised to try out OO.o, I have heard from several of them that they will never use MS Office again, when their trial version is so "buggy", that you can't even use it properly in the trial period.
Does ODF (well, something other than MS' formats) have a future? I would say it has a big future as long as Microsoft shoots itself in the foot instead of luring customers in with fully functioning/compatible programs.
But maybe that's just me.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.